Marketing Your Best Seller 111 Use One Hard- hitting Chapter as a Marketing Tool 吀栀is one is counterintuitive. You want people to buy your book, so you actually need to give some of it away for free. It sounds crazy, right? Why will people buy something when they can get it for free? But they do it every day. 吀栀ink about walking down the aisle of the supermarket, and there is a woman giving away free samples of corn chowder. You came to buy milk, but you taste the corn chowder. How can you refuse? It‘s free! And you like it, and think your mother might like it, so you 昀椀nd yourself walk- ing out of the store with a carton of milk and two cans of corn chowder. How did that happen? Someone gave you a taste for free. In 1983 Tom Peters published In Search of Excellence, the 昀椀rst of an entirely new generation of business books. 吀栀e book was written during the 昀椀rst big gasoline crisis in the late seventies, when there was a sense that Amer- ica couldn’t do anything right. Peters, a business consul- tant and a former professor, studied a small number of companies that were 昀椀nancially successful and had very high- quality products. He looked at what they were doing right and why. His publisher planned to print 10,000 cop- ies, but Peters himself photocopied an additional 15,000 copies and sent them to as many people as he could think of. He gave thousands of books away. 吀栀e publisher was